Early Decision asks a family to commit to a school in November, before any financial aid offer exists. The question "can we afford this?" therefore has to be answered before the school answers it. Most families answer it with the sticker price, which is the one number almost nobody pays.
The number you actually need is published — just not on the admissions page.
Five prices, not one
Federal reporting requires every college to disclose what students paid, on average, after grants, split by family income. Five bands: under $30,000, $30,000 to $48,000, $48,000 to $75,000, $75,000 to $110,000, and over $110,000. The figure is net price — cost of attendance minus grant aid, before loans.
Here is what that looks like at four schools that run Early Decision, from the 2023–24 academic year, the most recent the federal data covers.
Dartmouth: $41 · $489 · $2,695 · $8,534 · $52,036. Posted cost of attendance that year: $87,793.
Boston College: $4,284 · $7,304 · $13,112 · $19,999 · $60,308.
Villanova: $17,823 · $16,496 · $20,923 · $33,389 · $58,741.
Lehigh: $16,917 · $17,140 · $18,722 · $22,184 · $48,751.
Read across a row and the sticker price disappears for most families. Read down a column and the schools separate sharply. A family earning $60,000 pays, on average, under $3,000 at Dartmouth and around $21,000 at Villanova — for two schools whose posted prices are within a few thousand dollars of each other. Lehigh, whose lowest band is the highest of the four, is also the only one where the top band pays under $50,000 — a flatter curve, which is its own kind of information about who the school is built to enroll.
The cliff at $110,000
Look at the last column. At every school above, the top band is the outlier: Dartmouth jumps from $8,534 to $52,036 between the fourth and fifth bands. Boston College triples. This is the shape of need-based aid — it tapers as income rises and then, for families the formula judges able to pay, mostly stops.
The band is also wide. "Over $110,000" includes a family at $115,000 with two children in college and a family at $600,000. The average sits somewhere in between and describes neither. If your family is in that band, the published figure is a floor for the uncertainty, not a quote. That is precisely the situation in which committing blind is most expensive.
What the ED agreement actually says about money
The binding agreement every ED applicant signs has one widely recognized exit: if the financial aid offer does not make attendance possible, the student may decline. That clause is real and schools honor it.
But notice how it works. You learn the number in December, after you have promised to withdraw every other application on admission. You can walk away from an unworkable offer. You cannot hold it against a competing offer from another school, because under the agreement there isn't supposed to be one. The release protects you from the worst case. It does nothing for the more common case, where the offer is workable but meaningfully worse than what a similar school would have given.
That comparison — the one Regular Decision families make in April — is exactly what ED trades away. Which is why the pre-commitment number matters so much more for early applicants than for anyone else.
The three questions to settle before November 1
Which band are you in, honestly? Use the income the financial aid forms will use, not a round number. Straddling the $75,000 or $110,000 line changes the published figure by tens of thousands of dollars at need-heavy schools.
What is the number for your band at your ED school? Not the average net price, which blends all five bands and describes no one. The band figure.
Would you sign a check for that figure four times? If the band figure is in your range, ED costs you the ability to compare, and you may decide that is a fair price for the round's advantage. If the figure is not in your range, the aid release will probably save you in December — but you will have spent your one binding application to find out something the federal data could have told you in September.
One caution
These figures are averages of what past students in each band paid at each school. Aid formulas weigh assets, siblings in college, and business ownership in ways that move individual families off the band average, sometimes far off. Two families with identical income can be quoted very different prices by the same school. The published number is where the conversation starts, not where it ends. But it is a far better starting point than the sticker, and the schools reported it themselves.
Where the numbers come from
Net price by income band and cost of attendance are from the federal College Scorecard for the 2023–24 academic year, as reported by each institution. No figure above is an estimate.
PrepToDone puts the band figure next to every school on a list, alongside what each one published about its early round. Enter your schools, your score, and your income band, and see it free, without an account. The call on where to spend the application is the paid part — $49, once. Run your list.